Erase your personal data from the iPhone Video

Erase your personal data from the iPhone Video Transcript

>> Ahh, your old friend. The old ancient worn out first generation iPhone, probably heading out the door, maybe you sell it on eBay, maybe you're gonna give it to a friend. But before you send it on its way for it's newer cousin, you need to get all that personal data off there, like your email passwords and those compromising photos of you and of course all your friends email addresses and phone numbers. I'm Tom Merritt from CNET.com. That's what I'm gonna show you how to do on this Insider Secrets. ^M00:00:31 [ Music ] ^M00:00:42

>> If you're not too paranoid, then the following is all you have to do. Plug in your iPhone, launch iTunes, click on the iPhone and press Restore. This will return the iPhone to its virgin state. No files visible, no nothing. However, as the paranoid watching this right now are probably shouting at the screen, that doesn't actually get rid of all your data. Now I showed you in another Insider Secret how deleted files can be recovered. You don't want that happening here. In fact, an Oregon State Police detective was able to recover personal data from a refurbished iPhone he bought from Apple. Now Jonathan who posted those pictures recently posted his own way of wiping the iPhone. It's probably the most secure way I've seen. But it involves jail-breaking the iPhone after a Restore and then obtaining shell access via SSH. So you decide, your own paranoia to work Horacio if you want Jonathan's rock-solid way, head-on over to his Website. Meanwhile, here's the easier way we know of to rid your iPhone of as much recoverable data as possible. First, change your password, especially for email and social networking accounts access from the iPhone. Next, do the Restore we demonstrated above then and a little thanks to secureosis.com for this one. Go into iTunes and on the info tab, uncheck all options. Do the same on photos, podcasts and video. Now, create three separate Playlists that are all the same size as your iPhone storage capacity. If you got 7-Gigabytes of storage-free, make your Playlist 7-Gigabyte large. Go to the music tab and select the first three of your Playlist and sync. Watch that storage bar fill up. Now uncheck that Playlist, check the second Playlist, sync again and then do the same with the third Playlist. What you're doing here is kind of a fumbly, unofficial, three-pass override. Now restore the iPhone again and if you can preferably do it from a different computer. This will make most of your old data mostly unrecoverable, but it can't guarantee that every last shred is gone. For that, do Jonathan's method that I mentioned earlier. That's it for this edition of Insider Secrets. I'm Tom Merritt, CNET.com. ^M00:03:09 [ Music ]